Animal Companion / Familiar Character Sheets

This is a multi-layer PDF file. When you open it, it will be unreadable until you turn off some of the layers. To use it simply turn off all of the layers except for those that contain the information you desire.

1) For a blank sheet – turn off all of the layers except for the “Sheet” layer.

2) Turn on the layer “Familiar-Rat” for an almost ready-to-play rat familiar. It has the information filled in for a normal rat, but you will need to adjust its statistics based on your player character’s as explained in the 3.5 Players’ Handbook.

Please let me know if you discover any mistakes, or if you think I should have created these differently.

20 responses to “Animal Companion / Familiar Character Sheets”

You can! Download the PDF file and turn off all of the layers except for the “Sheet” layer. Then you will have a blank sheet that you can print out. You can type on that.
Perhaps I don’t understand your comment. Let me know if this doesn’t address your concern.

Note that what I am recommending below will not work with earlier versions of Adobe Reader. This requires the latest version (Adobe Reader XI) you can download it here:http://get.adobe.com/reader/
Try this:
Open the PDF file in Adobe Reader. You can refer to the wolf and the rat layers as examples of how to fill out the sheet. Then turn off all of the layers except for the “Sheet” layer. Under the Comments tab, in the Annotations section, select Add Text Comment. You can then type whatever information you want, whatever you want, with any font at any size. You can save this with everything filled in (I recommend saving it as a different file name). You can save a separate file for each of your animal companions and you can easily revise the information if it changes.
Let me know if this works for you. Good luck.

Open the file named “animal-sheet.pdf” in “PDF-XChange Viewer” and you will see all of the text displayed on top of each other. Click on the icon at the bottom that in this viewer looks like a jigsaw puzzle piece to open the list of layers. Then click on the little light bulb beside each layer you want to turn off. (Adobe Acrobat Reader uses little eyes instead of light bulbs, but it does the same thing.)

Would it be possible for you to just link a BLANK sheet and separate the other two. Your explanation how to close layers was confusing, I found nothing that looked like a jigsaw puzzle piece and nothing showing any kind of layering. I am confused as to WHY you wouldn’t have done that in the first place.

That is an excellent question. I suppose it seamed like a good idea at the time. Thanks to your suggestion, I have now included a BLANK sheet. Look at the bottom of the original post and you will find a link to it.
P.S. I knew that some people would have trouble with layers due to them being uncommon, and the variety of different PDF viewers in use. What I didn’t anticipate was the popularity of these animal companion character sheets. I would like to thank you and all of the others that have downloaded them. I hope they are or some value to you in your games. Please let me know if the new blank sheet works for you, and I would like to know about your animal companion, your character, the other characters in your group, and your game in general.

pretty good attempt. I noticed that you didn’t have all the skills for the familiar…?
familiars have the same number of ranks in any skill that their master has. so that needs to be changed. and as they level up they get ranks of their own as they are considered magical beasts. so instead of having only a misc modifier to adjust the skills they need to have a rank column and a master rank column, for every skill.

also there should at least be one box for a misc. modifier on the familiars AC. possibly even as many modifier boxes as a normal character has

I left off the skills I didn’t think they would use. I can’t see a familiar using Diplomacy, Appraise, Bluff, Concentration, Decipher Script, Disable Device, Disguise, Forgery, Gather Information, Handle Animal, Heal, Intimidate, Open Lock, Ride, Sense Motive, Sleight of Hand, Spellcraft, Tumble, Use Magic Device, Use Rope, or Knowledge. Of course, you could always use a regular Player Character sheet for your familiar. My idea was to keep the sheet as simple as possible. Feel free to create a new sheet based on this one that includes all of the additional fields you think it should have. If you do, please make it available to others free on-line and send me a link, or send me a copy and I will post it and add a link to it here.
Thank you for taking the time to comment on this. Your observations all have merit, but I won’t be changing this at this time.

hey, first time to your site and awesome companion sheet 🙂 very useful for the game im plotting, although i noticed a typo on the companion sheet, you flipped Con and Dex, not sure if this was intentional or not, i just thought to bring it up 🙂